By Jack Chui
"Amazing is an understatement" ~ Debbie Li late on Sunday night after 'Moving Day'
Debbie pretty much summed up yesterday's Moving Day in 4 words. Few things in my life are worth cause for excitement or expression of feelings given I'm not such a feelings person, but yesterday was one of them.
But for those new to STAY, I'll start from an earlier beginning and hope this post won't be so long.
One of the fruits to come out from the STAY ministry is the Outreach to refugees or asylum seekers. Two years ago, I was the leader for Outreach in STAY and was struggling to fulfill that role till I spoke to our then parish priest Father Peter. Father Peter has a great love for 'the forgotten' people in society and he spoke many times about his pastoral ministry to the refugees in detention and 'outside' detention. He wanted young people to befriend the refugees in detention because most other visitors were older (Father Peter is over 80) and the asylum seekers were mostly young men.
The visits to the detention centre in Melbourne started with a few people but word spread and the Outreach grew to include large groups including some regular goers. A year later, we also started to visit the newly released refugees in their homes with gifts of Christmas cake for that season and we continue to make visits once a month. As it visited these homes, a pattern becomes familiar - they are happier outside detention but there are other great struggles to make ends meet with the visa condition that they cannot work.
Recently, there had been a great need for mattresses because the large charities which normally supply them were in very short supply and so refugees who just move into a new rental property just have to sleep on the floor or take turns to share a single mattress among 5 or 6 young men. After seeing 2 families in one house with absolutely no furniture as they had just moved in 2 weeks before, it was time to put those little calls for help into action.
Yesterday, we ran our first 'Moving Day' where we would get some vans, and bring mattresses from people who wanted to donate them/give them away and bring them to the refugees that needed them. I haven't organised such a large operation before - the previous might be a church BBQ for 200 people but as you can imagine, its not an easy task to find mattresses, collect them, find people who need them and deliver them. In this whole experience I have 3 take outs that I wish to share.
God brought together what we needed
A week before yesterday, I only knew of 5 mattresses which our volunteers had expressed interest in donating and that was all I started with. But through the week, up till Saturday night before the day, all the things came in that would be needed to help us succeed. I did not have much idea of how to organise such a logistical problem, but people around me made suggestions, which not knowing much better I just followed through on to see what would happen. More mattresses came in, and some people found some to let us know. A priest lent us his own ute and borrowed another car to travel over the weekend. Budget Car rentals let us hire a large van for the price of small one after someone thought of their last move. A lady who saw a request for mattresses on Gumtree (goodness knows how my email request made its way there) put me in touch with the moving company Man With a Van and they generously donated a truck and 4 men.
God also brought together the right people. People to donate mattresses and furniture, people to help guide the drivers, people to sort through clothes and other household items, people to clean chairs, people to drive and people to make the deliveries. The response for volunteers was not the greatest, but was perfect for what we needed to do. We collected about 20 mattresses all up and with other furniture donated and from the church it filled the large Man With a Van truck, the whole boot of a 4WD and half the Budget van. There was a lot of stuff - enough you could say to be all of someone's belongings.
God made it work, in-spite of challenges and ourselves
The day was in my view not the smoothest of operations. My GPS ran out of battery and the hire van which I was driving couldn't charge it so I was picking up mattresses using google maps on my phone which my accompanying passenger was not familiar with using. People who were donating mattresses also offered to give us other furnitures which they were looking move - some useful which we took and others not so useful or difficult to find a use for (note to self - don't pick up fax machines...). When we got to sorting and loading the vans, there were different suggestions and counter suggestions which slowed down the re-arranging process and having to resort to compromises and short-cuts just to get the convoy moving to delivery mode at late afternoon. The chairs which the church wanted to give away just would not stack!
On the journey, there were different ideas on the order of houses we would visit to minimise the travel, road blocks which made us detour and take wrong directions which was wasting more time sitting in the van/car. The early houses we visited were half furnished to fully furnished and we struggled to give away mattresses and clothes to the point where we would offer them anything from the van so that they would take it from us. In desperation and frustration, I took it out on some of the kind volunteers to just do whatever it take to give it all away, because by the looks of it, I would have to take the majority of items which we so carefully collected and drove out west of Melbourne back to the city to 'dump' somewhere else. The team was not the most cohesive, yet, inspite of ourselves and the setbacks, God still made it work.
And not just work, but work so brilliantly. Each volunteer, though somewhat dysfunctional together and small in whatever we could do, gave the little of the skills/talent that we had to serve in different ways when we were interacting. God had brought together the right people to play our small part and He somehow just made it work. The 'men' with the Van moved furniture into houses much faster than what us amateurs could do. We had volunteers able to speak Sinhalese which some of the Sri Lankan refugees understood. Some of the ladies were good at fitting clothes or know where to find the right clothes/items in the vans. Some volunteers were good at talking to and entertaining the children. Others were good at picking items from the vans and bringing them in. Without each one of us, the whole operation would be so much less effective.
In the end, and amazingly, we managed to give away all but a box of ornaments all away and so not wasting what was given to us by our generous volunteers. Victory would not be so sweet without all the troubles that came with it...
Be very grateful for what I have
and God saved His greatest for last. After making little progress through the first 3 houses, we went to an address to whom Raj, the man of the 3rd house gave us - a family that would need what we had. We had a lot left - just over half the mattresses, half the chairs (started with 30) and a variety of odd furniture. When we arrived and welcomed ourselves, we saw what Raj meant - the household had literally nothing. All the rooms were empty - the Sri Lankan family of 5 with 2 young boys and the youngest a girl had just moved in 2 days ago.
In half an hour, we had furnished the large but derelict house with enough furniture to make it more comfortable than sitting and sleeping on the wooden floor. The men in the Van also went the extra mile to assemble four single bed frames from their parts so that the children would have nice beds to sleep on. We gave everything that they would need and it just about emptied all the vans and our stock. We also gave them the all rest of the warm clothes because they only had thin shirts to wear.
It was near dark when we arrived and the house had no lights working - until we checked the fuse box and turned on the switches. The family had been living in the dark for the last 2 days. They also told us that they had not eaten for the whole day, the only thing they had to eat was bread from the communion at church that Sunday morning. We were stunned... the children would not have eaten much if at all for the last 2 days. The ladies helped the mother of the household (I wish I knew their names) to the nearest supermarket, showing her where to walk to get there next time and buying some groceries for them to have meals for a week or so. They had no fridge so there would be no meat. We could not give them any plates or cooking tools because we had given them to another family before.
To see that we could do so much to help this one family was enough to lift my spirits - that all the late nights of organising and communicating with the many various people to get it all together was well worth it. I did not think about my tiredness and challenges I had to deal and put up with getting it altogether because I had seen first hand what real struggle really was. I will be very grateful when I have my regular meals. The simple things like clothes, heating, money and a bed.
Thank you Lord for this opportunity, and for using us to do your work and bring You glory.
